Had some nice weather here in Texas in January, especially over the MLK holiday (the company I work for is owned by a bank, so I get all the bank holidays). So I had the chance to pick up my daughter after school and spend a little time with her.

First we headed over to a soda shop called The Purple Cow – purple being the color of nearby Texas Christian University. The girl loved that place! They have a little train that runs around high up on the walls, and she insisted we get a booth right under it. My favorite part was when the train was directly over us – she’d look everywhere for it, until it turned at the corner and came back into view. We had the specialty of the house, which was a purple milkshake (actually vanilla), then headed around the corner to Borders.

Like me, my daughter loves bookstores. I swear we spent at least two hours hanging out there. She spent most of her time playing with a little “latch” game, a board that has a window latch, a chain latch, a hook-and-eye, etc. You undo each latch, then open a little door and there’s a picture behind it. So she played with that for a while, then played hide-and-seek with the cats and rabbits behind the doors. Then we spent half an hour trying to find a video of The Cat In The Hat without success.

* * *

I’m a big, hairy guy, and my wife always calls me a “big old bear”. So one day when driving around with my daughter, she asks me what bears eat. I told her I thought it was roots and berries, but I wasn’t really sure. She said, “But aren’t you a bear?”

That’s right. My four year old thought I was literally a bear.

And she may be right. The week after the Purple Cow it was in the high seventies (the brutal Texas winter) so we went to the zoo. They have a couple of Asian bears of some type there, dark brown with skin rolls like a Shi-tsu around their necks and long claws, for climbing or shredding tree bark or something. We get there, and the bears are shamelessly mugging for the crowd, playing and talking a what not. Then this bear takes this great paw full of claws, and uses it to scratch his ass. I thought, “Wow, I *am* a bear!”

The warm weather inspired some of the animals to get a little, ah, frisky. “Aw, look, the monkeys are playing- Whoa! Let’s move along, kids!” Some of the other animals had different ways of showing off; when we got to the elephant pen, a big bull dropped a huge pile of crap. It looked like a stack of cannonballs left over from Master and Commander. Then he proceeded to dance for at least fifteen minutes.

My own theory on that: no toilet paper = butt itch. Maybe he should get the bear to scratch for him.